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Friday, June 03, 2011

Send fax over internet

Reasons:

There are a couple of reasons to send long-distance fax over internet. Cost saving should be the primary one. As fax data is transmitted over public internet, we do not need to pay IDD charge to telephone company. In other cases, we just want to bypass the premise-provided telephone network, for instance, when we need to fax out from hotels or business centers.

Apart from outbound fax, it can work in the reverse path; you can receive fax over internet. Some internet fax service providers offer national fax numbers and forward incoming faxes over internet to you. In other words, it gives your sender the impression of faxing to a local number. Isn't it a beautiful feature?

Nevertheless, you still have to pay some recurring charges such as subscription and rental fees to the internet fax service provider.

How to put things together:

A typical scenario of sending and receiving fax over internet is shown above. The fax machine on the left is the one you use for internet faxing. It connects to a small networked device (we call it ATA) instead of a telephone socket on the wall. The fax machine on the right is just an ordinary one. The diagram basically involves four elements.

ITSP – Internet telephony service provider

This is the company that routes fax calls over internet to and from your fax machine. You need to obtain a service account (we call it a SIP account) from them and configure it in a small device (ATA) to work with your fax machine. The ITSP usually provides you a fax number for receiving fax. Some examples of such ITSP are www.didforsale.com, www.didww.com, www.zonetel.com.

Telephone network – the part A above

It refers to the public switched telephone network (PSTN) that we use from day to day. Our mobiles, landlines and fax machines are communicated within the PSTN. The ITSP is usually a gateway (or it lines up another in behind) to PSTN and therefore could terminate your fax to and receive from an ordinary fax machine (the one on the right).

Internet – the part B above

ATA – analogue terminal adatpor

It is provided by the ITSP and its purpose is connect your fax machine to them. It is a small device that provides two ports, one for connecting your fax machine and one for internet connection. Usually, the ATA device is pre-configured with a SIP account. The SIP account identifies you as a customer to them.

Now, you operate your fax machine as usual and the internet part is handled by the ITSP.

More...:

We all heard or used Skype or similar products that transmit voice over internet to save phone bills. We might not aware that the internet is not a stable and controllable environment in respect of bandwidth and latency. Nowadays, voice over internet could be optimized by various techniques such as lossy codecs and jitter buffer to control the demand of bandwidth and handle network delay. These are practical solutions because we are talking about voice -- in fact, our ears still perceive good quality even there is data loss technically. However, fax is different. Fax machines need much better accuracy in order to handshake, to negotiate speed and to successfully transmit. To tackle problems of fax over IP, a protocol named T.38 is developed by ITU. The virtue of this protocol is it encapsulates the original T.30 fax protocol in IP packets. Both sending and receiving fax machines are then thinking they are talking to a genuine fax. T.38 is supported by many ITSP and ATA. It is by now the industry standard of FOIP.

Yet the world is no perfect. Even with T.38 enabled, we sometimes see failed transmission when internet bandwidth is unstable. In addition, high speed transmission (such as the V.34 33.6kpbs) is not well supported in practice.

6 comments:

Good post...The technology has grown and now a days we can send fax through internet using the email.This eliminates the usage of paper ,saves time,more simple,since it doesn't require the fax machine we can access from any part of the world.I have availed the Fax Thru Email from XnYnZ.com and this is much more convenient for me.I send fax through email and vice versa.

yeah you right, but i was using along time ago didx.net service for sending and receiving fax. that's worth but due to my company ended for few reasons i stopped to using their service, but you should try.

While certainly not the only drawback, the biggest disadvantage of creating a network of this design is that the main computer (the one connected to the broadband connection) must always remain powered on in order for any other users to access the Internet.this site

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